Improve your Business Through Values

There are four critical issues preoccupying the boardrooms of both large and small companies today:

How to attract and keep talented people?

How to increase profits and shareholder value?

How to increase creativity and productivity?

How to ensure ethics permeate the corporate culture?

Building a successful corporate culture and value-driven leadership teams has become the most significant source of brand differentiation in business today.

Why are values-driven companies the most successful?

Values drive culture

Culture drives employee fulfillment

Employee fulfillment drives customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction drives shareholder value

What Are Values and Why Are They Important?

Values are deeply held principles that people hold or adhere to when making decisions. Individuals express their values though their behaviors and organizations express their values through their working culture.

Research shows that there is a strong link between financial performance and the alignment of an organization’s operating values to the employees’ personal values. Who you are and what your stands for is becoming just as important as the quality of products and services you provide.

In Corporate Culture and Performance, John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett shows that companies with strong adaptive value-driven cultures, outperformed other companies by a significant margin.

Kotter and Heskett found that companies had higher job creation rates, stock prices grew faster, and profit performance was 750 times higher than companies that did not have shared values and adaptive cultures.

In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras show that companies that consistently focused on building strong corporate cultures over a period of several decades outperformed companies that did not by a factor of six and outperformed the general stock market by a factor of 15.

John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance, (New York: The Free Press) 1992 James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last, Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: Harper Collins) 1994

Great Resource for Monroe County Employers

Monroe County NY JSEC is an independent organization under the auspices of the federal Department of Labor. JSEC stands for Job Service Employer Committee. We are one of 40 JSECs throughout New York State. The goal of the Monroe County JSEC is to provide expert information to employers on issues that affect the business community, engage in public / private ventures that will be of benefit to both employers and the labor force, and effect beneficial legislative changes at state and federal levels. JSEC also provides a vehicle to inform employers of services and programs of the Labor Department they can benefit from.

Meet Small Business Leaders

From Beginners to Bigshots

Forecast and Plan Budget- before opening the doors

Most entrepreneurs detest crunching numbers and creating budgets. Working on an annual budget confines the imagination and limits flexibility. Still, budgets are more important than ever in today’s business environment.

Don't be one to fall into excuses for avoiding budgeting. “Startup cash flow is too unpredictable.” “One big customer order could change the course of the business, so what’s the point in setting a budget?” "I can't predict what will happen next fiscal year until I see what happens this year."

In my experience, it's easy to make an excuse for the right-brain, creative side to take precedence . Entrepreneurs just don’t like left-brain financial planning. So, if you’re running your startup solo, you should force yourself to develop a budget to hold yourself accountable. Here' why:

1. It will help you to become a better manager. When done properly, budgets can be extraordinarily useful in testing and refining your ability to forecast and manage. While boards like to use budgets to hold managers accountable, the startup CEO can use budgeting to test whether the drivers of his business hold true. One straightforward way to do this is to set an annual budget with a set of key assumptions (e.g., number of new clients; product price), then reforecast the year every quarter by updating those assumptions with the latest results.
2. It will help you raise money. When trying to raised money from angel investors or institutional investors, the importance of budgeting is paramount. Investment terms often specify that management must provide the investors or the board an annual working budget. Developing a company culture that tracks results to budget will help you meet and exceed the expectations of your investors.
3. It will help you avoid running out of money. The No. 1 risk to any startup is running out of money. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you’ll fluctuate between a conservative reality and an aggressive dream state, which keeps you motivated and helps you inspire others. When you build your budget, start with expenses, not revenue; they’re much easier to forecast. This will keep you grounded and reduce your risk of running out of money.